workshop reports

What We learned at Pine Grove

The Saskatoon-Prince Albert chapter of CCLOW prepared and delivered a workshop for staff at the provincial correctional centre for women. About half of the staff at Pine Grove are of aboriginal ancestry, while about 80 per cent of the inmates are First Nations women.

The context

Women in conflict with the law have typically experienced many kinds of violence. This workshop sought to look at how violence in the lives of female inmates created barriers to their ability to learn and how staff could help them to begin to identify and dismantle the barriers.

The workshop had four main purposes:

• to collect data for CCLOW, through workshop evaluation, on the need for educational programs for staff about how violence affects women's ability to learn at a correctional facility;

• to provide workshop materials from an aboriginal perspective on how systemic racism, a form of violence, affects women's education and ability to learn;

• to provide workshop materials on how child sexual abuse, spousal abuse, ritual abuse and other forms of violence affect women's education and learning;

• to give Pine Grove staff an opportunity, both personally and institutionally, to explore ways to support women who are trying to tear down barriers that have prevented them from obtaining an education, and participating in further learning.

What we learned
We learned and re-learned a number of things. We were yet again struck by how context of both place and culture impact on education and styles of learning. Though some of the things we learned are basic to adult education, we want to emphasize their importance.

• It is important for women from different cultural backgrounds to work together to create learning programs that are appropriate for any given audience. It might be difficult to work with women who do not share all the assumptions you have about education or social issues or the solutions to the problems that arise from those issues. It is, however, worth the effort.

We were absolutely committed to asking an aboriginal woman to join us, and we were fortunate to hire an extremely capable, knowledgeable woman to complete our team. Her knowledge of and experience with residential schools and their contribution to the violence cycle was essential for our workshop. Her method of operation was different from our other facilitator, but it was no less effective. The two facilitators had to work out their differences, but they worked hard on it, and with the help of the third member of the workshop team, the safe worker, each came to understand and respect the other.